Honestly, with the tagline "There are only thirteen bullets between the world you know and the world they rule", and the dramatic final fight scene, I am getting the impression that this was an expanded short story.

The idea of how vampirism is transmitted is new and really damn smart. Once you're infected by vampirism in potentia--which depending on the power of the vampire can be done in a variety of ways; the particularly old or strong ones can apparently do it at will by making eye contact--then you become a vampire *if you kill yourself.* And the vampire having its hooks in your brain may hurry this process along; they can inflict horrible dream sequences which start to make suicide and vampirism seem very appealing. Ties into the old suicide legends; maintains the concept of infection; gets rid of the "doesn't everyone a vampire kills become a vampire" thing, which incidentally is probably a useful thing as the vampire in question are really horribly brutal.

(The book runs with an alternate history--one in which vampires have always been known to exist, but were beaten back. They're currently thought to be extinct in the wild--the book suggests a setting where one pops up somewhere in the world perhaps once every decade or two.)

There are also half-deads--zombie bodies, coherent minds--that have been fed vampire blood and are loyal to the vampire, right up until they fall apart. (There's an implication that vampires don't have to create half-deads out of the living; at one point Scapegrace[1] quickens (awakens, enlivens) a newborn's skull and hands it to someone, simply so he doesn't have to watch them closely--if they don't cradle it in both hands, it will start screaming. However, that might've been something rather slightly different. I don't mind not getting a catalog power listing.)

However. The book presents vampires as being tougher in direct proportion to how much blood they've drunk--I believe the phrase "so full of blood a bazooka couldn't hurt him" is applied to a vampire who's gorged on four or five people at one point. Similarly, the climactic fight scene involves a vampire who's fed so well that she's completely ignoring bullets fired at her heart from point-blank range. And yet this vampire is defeated by being tripped through a window (okay) which then shatters and cuts her to pieces (what?), causing her to lose so much blood that our protagonist can stab her through the heart several times with a jagged metal rod, killing her.

Given how hard that fight was played up, I felt rather cheated.---[1] Have I mentioned how much I love this name? It's not Gabriel Grey, but it's damn good.